You are a beautiful and unique snowflake…

In keeping with society’s never ending quest to ensure that no one has their feelings hurt, ever, for any reason whether justified or not, eBay has announced and implemented plans to remove a sellers’ ability to any non-positive feedback for all auctions.  From this point on, anyone who sells an item using the eBay service will only be able to leave positive feedback for their buyers.  More after the jump…

As a longtime eBay user on both ends of the deals, I can speak to the power of the feedback process.  As a seller, I often limit my items to buyers with a certain rating, especially on higher-end items.  As a buyer, I will almost never buy an item from a seller with too low a rating or too many negative feedbacks.  It’s just safe business practice.

However, with this new change, eBay has essentially decided that their users will be able to decipher that someone with a rating of ten or less is either very new to the eBay game or not a person to do business with.

I understand their theory even if I don’t agree with it.  By eliminating the neutral and negative feedbacks, buyers cannot have their reputations damaged by a seller who received payment a day late.  However, if this is the path eBay is going to choose to follow, then they should also eliminate a buyer’s ability to sully a seller’s reputation by filing a false negative for late shipment or an incorrect item.

Most eBay disputes can be settled through the company’s dispute resolution process, but not all.  I have had to deal with both ends of this process, both as buyer who never received what he paid for, and as a seller who was accused of misrepresenting what I was selling (I wasn’t – he couldn’t follow my instructions.  Idiot.)  Both cases were handled by the eBay dispute resolution process, and both were settled.  But having the ability to leave a neutral or negative feedback on the record of the buyer who falsely accused me of being a bad seller was an invaluable tool at my disposal – really, it is a seller’s only way to let others know in the future that a person may not be the most honest buyer in the world.

Unfortunately, now other sellers will be left to decide for themselves whether a buyer has a rating of +3 because they simply have not used the eBay community very often, or if they are +3 because they stiffed eleven other sellers on payments and there is no way to leave a black mark on their record.

eBayers have always been pretty forthright in their comments and feedback.  Of the millions and millions of transactions flowing through the website daily, I would estimate that there are fewer than 5,000 feedbacks that are purely vindictive; a negative for a seller who shipped his item a day or two late, or for a buyer who chose to send a payment via snail mail rather than PayPal (which is a whole other eBay argument altogether).  But for the most part, eBayers police themselves pretty well.

However, it seems that the eBay administrators have decided that we are no longer competent enough or smart enough to do it for ourselves.  Shame.  But on the bright side, at least no one will be able to leave me a frowning emoticon anymore.  :)